The Many Ghosts of George Kennan

No one likes to be over edited. Least of all Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. So much so that he pulled his article “Containing Russia: Back To The Future?” [Part One and Part Two] from publication in Foreign Affairs because, according to a statement released by the Russian Foreign Ministry:

The Editors, with reference to their own standards, substantially edited the article, if not censored it. It was cut by 40%, losing a considerable part of its original meaning. Some editing even meant that Sergey Lavrov was to subscribe to certain Foreign Policy positions of the present US Administration, to which Russia objects on grounds of principle. Having gone through that all and motivated exclusively by the interests of strengthening US-Russian relations, we had to face an utterly artificial and unacceptable demand by the Editors. We were required to supplement the article’s title “Containing Russia: back to the future?” with a subtitle which read “averting a new Cold War” or “a conflict between Russia and America.”

FA editor James Hoge, speaking in an interview with RFE/RL, rejected “all suggestions of censorship” and that Lavrov’s retraction “was a total surprise” and was “kind of baffling.”

The editorial dispute according to Hoge concerns his request that Lavrov provide a subheading for the article, which is standard practice for FA articles. But Lavrov “balked at presenting one. We then said, we really have to have it, all the essays have it, it’s really a format formality, you can choose the wording you want, if you want a few suggestions, we’ll make them, which we did. And the next thing we know, he just sends us an email withdrawing the piece with no explanation.” In regard to Lavrov’s claim the edited version would aggravate US-Russian relations, Hoge replied, “Well that’s nonsense. The piece — you can see because the Russian Embassy thinks it is so aggravating they have put it on the wire (newswires), which we would have done too, but we didn’t want to violate his copyright — it’s a very tame piece.”

The thrust of the piece is a reply to Yuliya Tymoshenko’s May/June 2007 article “Containing Russia.” That article, which opens with a reference to George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” raises the specter of Russia’s “age-old imperial designs,” this time fueled by its oil-gas empire, and argues that “the West must seek to create counterweights to Russia’s expansionism and not place all its chips on Russian domestic reform.” Basically it seems to me with her arguments about the need to create a “collective energy market” i.e. the EU should negotiate energy deals collectively rather than on a state by state basis, while at the same time promoting “democracy and free markets” amount to a new form of containment policy. Yet, despite all these, Tymoshenko maintains that “I do not believe that a new Cold War is under way or likely.” You could have fooled me.

The article is also a plea for Western European and American backing of Ukraine. “By strengthening our independence,” Tymoshenko writes, “we can shape Europe’s peace and unity as we roll back the crony capitalism and lawlessness that are now the norms of the post-Soviet world.”

My favorite line is “Russia’s leaders deserve understanding for their anguished struggle to overcome generations of Soviet misrule.” As if Russia’s leaders are wounded children that need nurturing, understanding, but also a bit of tough love. I doubt infantalizing Russia’s leaders will hardly garner their cooperation.

If anything, Tymoshenko’s article makes it crystal clear where she stands in all this: Save us from the Russians because your future is tied with ours.

Lavrov, of course, sees right through this ruse. “The mere posing of the question [of whether or not to contain Russia],” he writes, “suggests that for some almost nothing has changed since the Cold War.” Lavrov never mentions Tymoshenko or Ukraine specifically and mostly addresses the US as if the former is merely a puppet of the latter. So despite all his claims that the Cold War is anachronistic and “it is time to bury the Cold War legacy and establish structures that meet the imperatives of this era,” Lavrov nevertheless speaks in terms of a West-East binary. Still he does well to draw attention to the “limits of force” (a direct shot at Washington) in dealing with some of the crisis that plague the world. But his scope for those problems are limited to those which directly affect Russia’s interests: Iran, Kosovo, and NATO expansion. While serious issues for sure, but besides nuclear proliferation, the real crises are yet to come.

If Russia wants to be a partner in global cooperation in dealing with the world’s problems it needs to take stock of how many of its current domestic problems are also global ones: the increasing gap between rich and poor, migration/immigration of redundant populations, the rise in ethno-religio-nationalist radicalism, the increasingly collapse of secular political movements as vehicles for political change, the rise of low intensity political violence by groups that lack state power, and the “balkanization” of the Middle East and Central Asia as a result of all this.

It seems to me that no binary can encompass the totality of these processes. Not East-West, nor North-South. Because when you look at the topography of the world, conditions previously relegated to the former are now found in the latter, and vice versa. Such is the bequeathal of globalization.

Thursday morning, Moscow time, four Russian government officials came to the office of my English-language newspaper, the Exile, and conducted an “unplanned audit” of our editorial content. They are carrying out an inspection of my paper’s articles to see, in their words, if we have committed “violations.” And they specifically asked to question me, since I’m officially listed as the founding editor-in-chief.

I started up the Exile 11 years ago with a Russian publisher, and it grew into a kind of cult phenomenon, with an online readership of 200,000 visitors per month, launching the careers of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and the “War Nerd,” Gary Brecher, but ensuring that anyone who sticks with the paper is condemned to a life of poverty and paranoia.

In all my years I’d never heard of an “unplanned audit” of editorial content. The insiders whom I contacted all said, “It’s … strange.” That’s how my Russian lawyer reacted, it’s how an American official reacted, and it’s even how the head of the Glasnost Defense Fund reacted, even though his NGO focuses on problems between the Russian media and the Kremlin.

“As far as I know, there has never been a single Moscow-based media outlet which has been audited like this,” Glasnost’s lawyer told me. “We’ve seen a few of these in the far regions, but never Moscow. But really, don’t worry about it, Mark, I don’t think you’re in any personal danger at this point.”

I first learned of the government audit last week while I was out in California dealing with a family illness. I was already in a heightened state of paranoia at the time—one week in my native suburbia is all it takes to trigger panic attacks—so when the government sent notice of the “unplanned audit” to our office, my first thought was, “Can an American get political asylum in his own country?” Then I remembered some of the articles I’d written from Moscow—for example, my post–2004 U.S. presidential election editorial titled “Gas Middle America,” and how former U.S. congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) once used his office to pressure the Russian authorities into arresting me because of a prank I’d played—and the next thing I knew, I was rifling through my mother’s medicine cabinet looking for something strong to steal.

Eventually I calmed down and flew back to Moscow in time for the audit. At 11 a.m., four officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage arrived—the men in shabby Bolsheviki suits, and a squat middle-age woman with pudgy arms and hands that pinched the seams of her wrists. On the advice of a Russian attorney, we greeted them with a box of dark chocolates. It was solid advice, and probably did more to protect us than a hundred attorneys’ briefs could have.

Related

Are your backyard barbecues breeding Bolsheviks? Deep cover agents posing as a two car garage, 2.3 kid, suburban, all-American family? Mysterious sultry, salon dyed Slavic redheads friending you on Facebook? Foreigners who dazzle with superb hydrangea pruning skills? Watch out America, the Russians are coming, and one of them might look just like you.

There isn’t much to be said about the busted Russian spy ring at this point. We all know the story of 11 secret agents planted by the “Moscow Center” to dig up information about nukes, policy, and backroom rumors in Washington. We all have fawned, or read about the fawning over the PG-13 pics of “Anna Chapman,” the femme fatale of this real life Naked Gun movie (if the Chapman obsession wasn’t pathetic enough, now the Marines are now using her to warn sailors about “the use of good-looking women to lower a man’s defenses.” Oh, brother.) We’ve also have seen how Moscow has laughed all of this off, and though it has questioned it’s timing, hasn’t retaliated in its usual way by expelling American diplomats. We also know that this scandal will probably not effect any future burger lunches between Obama and Medvedev. We pretty much know, unless FBI documents reveal otherwise, that Moscow’s “illegals” weren’t very good spies at all. Finally, we also were informed that Christopher Metsos flew the coop in Cyprus and Juan Lazaro would sell out his kids before violating his “loyalty to the Service.”

Had enough?

Not by a long shot.

Besides all the manufactured drama of this spy ring, which James Meek over at LRB Blog rightly calls “a kind of performance art” fit for an HBO series, what has intrigued me about all of this is how the spies were “a typical, child-obsessed American family.” Indeed, as Meek notes, the deep cover Russian spies are a real life analogy to the suburban mafiosi in the Sopranos, the drug lords cum legit businessmen in The Wire, or the faux-humanoid aliens of V. They attended block parties and barbecues, showed up at PTA meetings and picnics, babysat the neighborhood kids, joined social networking sites, and had pretty ordinary jobs.

According to the FBI complaint to the court, becoming just like us was the Russian spies’ primary mission:

The FBI’s investigation has revealed that a network of illegals is now living and operating in the United States in the service of one primary, long-term goal: to become sufficiently “Americanized” such that they can gather information about the United States for Russia, and can successfully recruit sources who are in, or are able to infiltrate, United States policy-making circles.

It appears that they were good at the first part–becoming sufficiently Americanized–but bad at the second–infiltrating US policy-making circles. Win some, lose some.

The Murphys doing as the Romans do

For me this dose of spymania says more about America than it does about the ineptness of Russian espionage. What several of the “illegals” proved was how vapid and boring American suburban life really is. All “illegals” like the Murphys had to do was pounce around in polo shirts, swig a couple of Diet Cokes, parent a couple of blond children, drive a Beemer, and don a pearly white smile fit for a real estate agent. They were so good at it that they were able to do it without being married, though some spy to spy booty call was not out of the question. For spy turned tabloid sensation Anna Chapman, posing as an ambitious twenty-something ready and able to hang out in the NY party scene was easy. All she had to do was pour some five-and-dime red dye on her head and hit the clubs. According to one former lover in Britain, Chapman knew how to work it.

Shocked Charlie Hutchinson, 31, said after seeing Anna Chapman’s picture in The Sun: “While we had sex she was talking and moaning in Russian. It lasted for 2½ hours and was so sexy. She was incredible.

The bespectacled law student told how the temptress – arrested by the FBI – was on a night out in Southampton when she jumped into his cab as he headed back to the university’s halls of residence.

He had earlier got talking to her as he boozed with chums at a student pub – called the White House.

Charlie, who is still studying in Southampton three years on, said: “Both of us were drunk. When we got into my room she began doing a striptease while I sat on the bed.

“She has a stunning figure – and had no underwear on. She really knew what she was doing.”

A week later they met up again for a romantic meal at an Italian restaurant – followed by more romps. He said: “She was wild in bed – a 14 out of ten. She knows positions I had never imagined.”

Hubba. Hubba. But hey Chapman’s ability to go into deep cover was in her genes. It has been revealed that her father was a KGB officer. A certain VVP perhaps?

After reading several stories about how ordinary these “spies” lives were (okay, maybe Chapman’s wasn’t too vanilla), I can imagine that all their training to capture “American realism” was to watch Hollywood movies. The LA Timessuggested as much with: “If their cover jobs were ordinary, their secret lives had a humdrum side that sometimes seems more like Woody Allen than John LeCarre.”

Or check out the itemized expense report from Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley to the “Moscow Center”:

If you asked me, it sounds like Heathfield and Foley got themselves sucked into American middle class suburban hell.

Now that they’ve been busted, the spies can now join the pantheon of other “dark forces” who’ve managed to burrow into American suburban life. Middle class whitey is already wrecked with anxiety over the death of the American dream, the collapse of suburban schooling, sexual predators, illegal immigrants, serial killers, and terrorists. Now they have to worry about spies too? And ones that look, act, and consume like them! I sense someone reaching for their Xanax.

Living the Americanized Dream

Just because infiltrating into American life may be easy, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous. Not dangerous for those unsuspecting suburbanites, but for the infiltrators themselves. Barbecues and Beemers are tempting and the ‘burbs can be seductive. “Americanization” is luring to many despite, or perhaps, because of its vapidness. This is probably why the “Moscow Center” grew suspicious when the Murphy’s wanted to buy a house in Montclair, New Jersey. The Murphy’s wrote to the Center after being rebuffed:

In order to preserve positive working relationship, we would not further contest your desire to own this house. We are under an impression that C. views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here. We’d like to assure you that we do remember what it is. From our perspective, purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solve the housing issue, plus to ‘do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.

According to the LA Times, the Murphys had already embraced middle class entitlement. One one them later “whined” that their handlers in Moscow “don’t understand what we go through over here.” They won’t let me own a house just like my neighbors! Whaaa!

The lesson in all this is that whitey needs to be more vigilant. Apparently living in Obama Nation has caused them to slip. Tsk. Tsk. Wake up white people! We not just taking about your children’s purity anymore. It’s not just the perverts and brown people you need to look out for. The ones that look, act and do as you do are the most dangerous. We’re talking about the protecting America from the evil Russians. Remember Communism? The Cold War? Reds in the State Department? Do you really want to be responsible for the Russianization of America? I didn’t think so. To borrow an often quoted line from the great philosopher Donald Rumsfield:

“There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

It is the “unknown unknowns” that we need to watch out for. For they could be living unbeknownnst right next door to you.